Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. Join a founding team who’ve shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We have raised over $175M with support from top-notch venture capital firms and more than 18 strategic investors: industry leaders in construction, building products manufacturing, and distribution.

Higharc is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join as one of the founding roles on our new Forward Deployed team. You'll work embedded alongside a large production homebuilder to turn plans into actionable data.

Responsibilities

• A homebuilder's plan library is the product data behind its entire business — and at enterprise scale, that data is almost entirely unstructured. Plans live as drawing sets scattered across semi-autonomous divisions, renamed and re-numbered as they move. Nobody can say with confidence which plans are duplicates, how many versions of a given home exist, or what actually varies between them.
• Higharc converts those catalogs into structured, queryable plan data, and builds the analysis on top of it: searchable plan libraries with agent-enabled natural-language search, geometric similarity scoring that surfaces plans which have forked under different names, structured mapping of what varies across a library, and classification that makes consolidation decisions possible. You'll build what gets shipped in the field.
• This role is for someone who wants to build against real, messy data in front of the customer, not two abstractions removed from it.
• Expect to:
• Embed with HQ, regional, and division teams to run technical discovery — profile plan assets, assess data quality, and reverse-engineer how each division's drawing sets encode variation
• Build and ship the searchable plan library, analytics dashboard, and agent-enabled natural-language search — own the pipeline from raw plan ingestion through structured, queryable output
• Tune and extend Higharc's Autotranslate AI capabilities to identify, categorize, and translate floorplans into data
• Work hands-on with the data — write the ETL, build against internal APIs, and ship working capability back to users directly rather than handing off a spec
• Build geometric similarity scoring and classification models that surface plans which have forked under different names
• Meet delivery milestones — coverage targets, data-field completeness, QA error thresholds — and flag tradeoffs in real time when schedule pressure argues against them
• Instrument and quantify results: redundancy across a catalog, dimensional spread on repeated conditions, consolidation candidates, and the purchasing leverage each one represents
• Partner with the Forward Deployed Product Manager, Technical Lead, QA, Intake Specialists, and Client Strategy, and present technical progress and tradeoffs to executive stakeholders
• Build the repeatable version — turn one-off scripts and data patterns into reusable tooling that lets the forward deployed model work on the next engagement, not just the current one
• Travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time.

Requirements

• You're happiest closest to the customer, and you've learned that the fastest path to the right answer is usually to go build it and see. You're comfortable being handed a scope that is 70% specified and a data set nobody has structured before. You can sit with an architect reviewing how a plan set is drawn in the morning and ship the pipeline that tests your hypothesis about it in the afternoon.
• You know the difference between a demo and a deliverable, and you build the one the situation actually calls for.
• 5+ years of engineering experience, including significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings — forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services
• Strong hands-on data fluency: SQL, scripting against APIs, comfort in notebooks, and a habit of interrogating a data set yourself rather than requesting a pull
• Experience prototyping to validate ideas quickly using tools like Cursor, Replit, or V0.dev
• A track record building structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and getting a system to actually run on them in production
• Strong judgment about data quality — what level of accuracy a decision requires, and what it costs to get there
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive stakeholders who have limited time and no patience for status without substance
• Willingness to travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time
• A major plus if you also bring:
• Background in residential construction, homebuilding, architecture, or AEC technology — especially fluency with plan sets, elevations, options, and how builders manage plan variation
• Experience with agent-based or natural-language search over structured data, RAG systems, or LLM-powered analytics
• Exposure to geometric or spatial data — CAD/BIM, computer vision on drawings, similarity and clustering methods
• Experience working with large, messy, enterprise-scale data migrations or ingestion programs
• Having built a function from zero: first hire into a new team, new practice, or new delivery model
• Working at Higharc
• Remote work and travel: Our company is entirely remote, and has been since we were founded in 2018. Remote work means more time with family, less time commuting, and the flexibility to blend work and life. We value in-person collaboration and asynchronous deep-work time, which is why we schedule regular team meet-ups in our hubs across the US and, depending on the role, prioritize hiring in those hubs. If your role requires frequent travel beyond pre-scheduled team meet ups, we will represent that to the best of our ability as early as possible in the interview process.
• Compensation and benefits: Higharc offers competitive salaries with significant equity, in a fast-growing, well-funded company. We provide comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with flexible PTO, and meaningful maternity/paternity leave to all U.S based employees that are full-time. You'll also have access to other big-company benefits such like short and long-term disability plans and a 401K. We also provide a stipend to create the ideal home office and support ongoing L&D.
• Please note: we are seeing an uptick of fraudulent recruiting activity claiming to be associated with Higharc. All communication and outreach from our in-house team will come from an @higharc.com email address.